Culled Danish mink resurface after burial

AS IF the Danish government’s rushed decision to cull and bury more than 10 million mink wasn’t a grisly enough story, thousands of the animals’ bloated cadavers have begun to re- emerge from shallow graves.

The phenomenon was reported by Denmark’s state broadcaster DR on Tuesday after carcasses were spotted popping up to the surface at a mass burial site at a military training field on Sunday.

“It is an extraordinary situation,” Thomas Kristensen, a press officer with Denmark’s National Police, which is responsible for the mink burials, told DR. “In connection with the decay, gasses form, which cause the whole thing to expand a little, and then in the worst case they get pushed out of the ground.”

The environment ministry, which is regulating the burials, said in a statement that the minks’ return from the grave was a “temporary problem tied to the animals’ decaying process”.

The cadavers’ eerie reemergence has triggered a flurry of zombie jokes on Twitter. “2020, the year of the zombie mutant killer minks,” wrote online marketer Stefan Bogh-andersen.

Denmark earli er t hi s month announced plans to cull all of its mink in the hope of wiping out a vaccineresistant mutation of Covid19, which had developed in the country’s mink farms.

The cull decision has turned into a national scandal after the government of prime minister Mette Frederiksen acknowledged it had no legal right to order a cull of mink not contaminated by the Covid variant.